Blog Post #1

Prompt: Tell us about a classroom event this year that had an impact on your professional growth and/or vision this year.


Response: This past quarter was incredibly challenging from a teaching standpoint. My fifth graders had a lot of bad habits and demonstrated disrespectful behavior consistently throughout the day. There was one student in particular whom we shall call C. C's parents are divorced and there is a lot of animosity between them that C has to deal with on a daily basis.  One day C came to school looking really sad, and was not demonstrating the typical behavior I would expect from him. Usually he would be interjecting during every part of the lesson, getting out if his seat, talking back to me when I asked him to do something, making fun of other students, and in general disrupting the class. 

However, this day he simply sat in his seat with a sullen look on his face, disengaged from the class and in a completely different world. During an independent work time I came over to him and crouched down to speak with him. I asked C what was wrong and he proceeded to tell me about how his Mom had taken away $200 of his birthday money he had been saving up to buy an ipod with. I asked him why she had taken it away, and he replied "She says I don't deserve it because I am a bad kid."

My heart broke for C because I knew how much he cared about the ipod, and I knew that C is capable of great and extraordinary things academically. I made the decision to tell him that he is not a bad kid, and that I think he has a lot to offer the class. I then told C that if he continued to have a good week and demonstrated to me that he could control himself in class, I would send a positive note home at the end of the week. C had the best week of his life that week and I sent two positive notes home: one to his mom and one to his dad. 

Throughout this experience I learned that as a teacher, I cannot control what goes on outside of my classroom in my student's homes. However, I can control how a student is made to feel in my classroom and the attitude I bring into teaching. I think it is incredibly important to remember that our students can come to school with deep wounds that have been given to them by others, and often we need to clean up the mess. If we ignore the feelings and emotions of our students, we are teaching them that we are just another person who has let them down and will not fight for them. I showed C that I was on his side, that I wanted him to succeed and have a good week. He in turn lived up to the high expectations I had for him and was a joy to have in the classroom. 


-Ebey 

retrieved from http://www.flickr.com/photos/8675949@N08/4248748785/sizes/m/in/photostream/